When less is more: innovations for tracking progress toward global targets

This paper argues that the success of global initiatives will in part depend on developing coherent, standardized and decision-relevant monitoring systems. The scientific community and private sector must continue to innovate, bring together lessons learned from pilots and build partnership models that foster sustainability of these initiatives. The development community needs to embrace the new approaches being developed that have the potential to match the necessary scale of monitoring.

As the world changes, however, so will the best approaches to meet monitoring demands. Iterative review and adaptation of analytical approaches and available technology will almost certainly be needed to continuously design ways to best track global progress.

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volumes 26–27, June 2017, Pages 54–61. Shared under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).